Preparing our students to tackle the urgent and complex environmental problems we face is a critical challenge facing higher education. Problems such as global climate change, water resource management, and sustainable development are dynamic and complex problems that require transdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to solve. Socio-environmental synthesis is one such research approach that considers the integrated nature of the environment and human society, and combines insights, methods, and data from the natural and social sciences to produce knowledge and inform solutions.

The National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) is dedicated to educating about this research approach and its broad relevance, and to teaching core concepts and competencies necessary to understand, research, and address complex socio-environmental problems.

SESYNC will host participants for a 3½-day short course on Teaching Socio-Environmental Synthesis with Case Studies. The course will be held July 23–26 at SESYNC in Annapolis, MD. The goals of the short course are to:

introduce participants to socio-environmental synthesis research,

train participants in the Case Study Method, a powerful and effective teaching approach, and

enable participants to write case studies related to socio-environmental synthesis that can be used in their classrooms and shared on the SESYNC website and/or the online collection of the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science (NCCSTS).

This resource was developed as part of the Teaching Socio-Environmental Synthesis with Case Studies short course, held at SESYNC in July 2013. This case has been peer-reviewed and accepted in the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science's case study collection. This case has been tested in a classroom.

Quick Links

Funding Opportunities

SESYNC is supported by an award from the US National Science Foundation (Grant #s DBI-1052875 and DBI-1639145) to the University of Maryland, with additional support from University of Maryland, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, and Resources for the Future.